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Saturday, 23 February 2013

Rhino on the Menu

There’s been a recent posting doing the
rounds on face book that suggests that dried rhino poacher testicles are
efficacious in the prevention of HIV AIDS. This I find very funny as I am sure
many other readers do, and heaven forefend that I should pour cold water on the
sharpness of that particular wit. Quite the opposite, such acerbic and cynical humour
deserves to be encouraged because it demonstrates the sheer absurdity of the
situation.

I am not a save the rhino activist, not
because I have no interest but because I am not sure what the real value of this collective concern is. I have a hollow feeling that there is a fundamental
fallacy in this world-wide breast-beating and that it is actually a reduction to fanciful and
shallow declarations of rhino love that are doomed to failure. And before you
fling this argument out with the bath water please consider some unassailable
facts.

Here’s a quote from a concerned
organisation – “At the beginning of the 20th century there were 500,000 rhinos
across Africa and Asia; in 1970 there were
70,000; . . . . . 95% of all the rhinos
in the world have now been killed.” You can read the rest of the sorry facts at
http://www.savetherhino.org/.

The same article has a graph that
chillingly demonstrates the rise in rhino killings over the immediate past few
years, and needs no comment;

Killings mind you. The recent decimation of
the rhino population has nothing to do with habitat loss; it is exclusively due
to the direct and violent actions of man.

So here’s the deal, the very real deal. Yet
again here is a test of our self appointed but evidentially shaky stewardship
of the environment, and for once this test is a very simple one.

Here is a very visible mammal, one of the
biggest and heaviest mammals still walking on this planet. This unique chap
(and I use the word chap in a non-gender sense), this chap is on the verge of
extinction exclusively because of the direct actions of members of our
own species. This animal is being driven to extinction because its horn is
supposed to increase the human sex drive.

The Rhino is on the menu. Not as burger
meat, Diceros tartar, grilled, stewed or casseroled. (although I do wonder if had it
been on restaurant menus the efforts towards its preservation might have been
different) No, Rhinos are on a far more important menu. This is the menu that
we have been unwittingly formulating for centuries. Previous delicacies have
included the Dodo, the Carrier Pigeon, the Great Auk, the Quagga, and Stellers
Sea Cow. Aside from the Rhino, current menu specials include the Leatherback
Turtle, the Northern Right Whale, the Amur Leopard, the Chinese Giant Salamander
(this last is incidentally being eaten to extinction). These are just some
of the visible ones, there are many, many more less visible starters, main
courses and sweets.

However unlike other menu items this one is
different.

This has to be the subject of one of the
most visible and obvious and controllable of all the traumas that we have
visited upon our environment. We are better equipped to deal with this than any
other that I can think of. It is contained. The threats are very visible and
the locations of all remaining Rhinos are known. The sources of demand for the
rhino-horn are known. The reasons for the crime are known. And above all it is
recognised the world over as a crime! There is no debate, it is a crime. There
is no demurring UN resolution. Even the killing of whales is subject to debate,
but Rhino poaching is not. There is not one country that is insisting that
rhino slaughter is necessary for the advancement of science. The more I write
about this the more irrational I get! What am I missing?

We are living in a world where remotely
controlled unmanned drones can kill entire families attending wedding
ceremonies in Pakistan.
Satellite technology is so intrusive that your most private and intimate
moments al fresco in the bush or the
countryside are visible to a peeping tom thousands of kilometres away in
Langley Va, USA. Heat source recognition can identify warm blooded creatures
over long distances, and DNA testing and mapping is at its most sophisticated.
Yet – with all this technology that can be brought to bear (and doubtless much more
that I know nothing about), we – the collective we that is – are allowing
criminals to slaughter in unprecedented quantities very large, visible and
ponderous beasts. A level of slaughter that will lead to their certain extinction
in a matter of a very few years.

The fact of the matter is that collectively
we have it entirely within our power to stop the extinction of the
rhino. And we should be taking this very seriously for two fundamental reasons.
Firstly we known that unless we take action against ourselves the Rhino will
die out; this is self evident and the world can be, and has been alerted to
this fact. Secondly the rational world has the wherewithal to prevent the
criminal activity that is going to be responsible for this act. If humanity does
not take positive action we have betrayed our sentience, our hard won cognitive
abilities and our cultural and spiritual heritage – our “humanity”; and we have
negated to an astonishing degree our new found world-wide abilities of
communication and collective governance. These will have been lost at the altar
of greed and collective indifference.

The prevention of this scourge does not lie
with those who manufacture clever aphorisms on face-book and other social media and buy car ornaments and windscreen stickers.

I’m afraid these well intentioned efforts
go nowhere, and indeed have gone nowhere.

What are you going to be able to say in
2020 when after any number of bumper stickers, faux rhino-horn grille badges
and countless poignant face-book postings the last rhino has been slaughtered
for a one hundredth of its body weight? Oh and by the way that was the
last one, there are no more. All used up. . . . . "Well - I did my bit!" But did
you? What you did was to express your solidarity with – what? A noble movement?
You felt sympathy for a one ton mammal condemned because it had a fibrous
growth that some silly sod some years ago deemed – deemed mind you – without any
shred of analytical evidence (for which we sentient and inquisitive minds pride
ourselves) to be somehow efficacious for the human metabolism. But you were never
in a position to do anything about this.

You were never in a position to do anything
about this because the real and practical responsibility lies with those who
are responsible for the conduct of laws that are supposed to prevent the
activities of criminals who are feeding the bizarre appetites of ignorant
people who form a miniscule
proportion of global society.

As face-book readers the world over chuckle
over jokes about poachers testicles, there is a chap in Vietnam grinding
up rhino horn to sell to some idiot who has been persuaded that his fading
libido can be saved by imbibing powdered fibre. At the same time there are a
bunch of guys in Mozambique
gearing up to slaughter the 98th rhino (sorry this has just risen to
102nd during the period it’s taken me to write this piece) this year
in the KrugerPark
to supply the fellow in Vietnam. . . . and in between there are a bunch of felons who are profiting hugely from this
activity.

So forgive me if I do not buy a dodgy
looking plastic rhino-horn for the grille of my car or subscribe to yet another
frankly directionless petition. I will keep the free “Save the Rhino” sticker
(why not sell them to raise some cash for lobbying?) because it would be
small minded to chuck it away – and god knows there is enough small minded
behaviour involved here already.

No what I am going to do – is all I can do – and that is write to my Minister for Environmental Affairs and request in the
strongest possible terms that he sponsor or at least support a UN resolution
that will insist that

a)South
Africa, and any other
country that has stewardship and responsibility for a rhino population take all
necessary and draconian measures to protect their charges, and

b)that all countries that are known
to be recipients of Rhino body parts be charged with pursuing miscreants with the utmost
rigour and meting out the maximum possible sentences for those dealing with or consuming
in any form those body parts, and that,

c)these countries and any other
intermediary countries be responsible for continued and monitored dialogue
between themselves in order to achieve the forgoing.

I suggest you do too, and quickly, because there
is precious little time left and our citizen’s efforts have hitherto been
utterly ineffectual. And if your own country demurs, obfuscates or places silly
obstacles in the way of your demands then mass action might be a good response,
because this is serious.

Oh, and don’t forget that simple economic price theory dictates that as the supply of
Rhinos decreases the rewards for horns will increase. This game is going to
get exponentially a whole lot dirtier.

A Rhino in the Mitchell garden, in a
very safe environment but also with little
hope of survival.

A Kruger Park Rhino in a very dangerous
environment with little hope of survival.

3 comments:

Everything you say is so true Steve - have you read 'Killing For Profit' The extent of the whole dirty, evil, stupid mess is just unbelievable and the demand in Asia is SO great that it makes one feel that there is little hope. Stupidity and GREED will be the ultimate destroyers of our beautiful world.